Brexit: Progress on trade deals slower than promised

The government is set to miss its target of securing post-Brexit trade deals as figures show a 15% drop in the number of UK exporters.

In the 2019 election, the Conservatives pledged to reach deals covering 80% of UK trade by the end of this year.

The latest numbers suggest it will be just 63%.

A government source said a trade deal with the US was crucial to meeting the goal, but the Biden administration had not made it a priority.

The government also this year has set a target of reaching a free trade deal with India by Diwali on November 12, which fell short.

Treaties have been signed with the EU and 71 countries including Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

The Japanese deal came under criticism earlier this year after government figures showed exports of British goods and services to that country had fallen over the past year.

Former Environment Secretary George Eustice also criticized the Australia deal, arguing it was “actually not a very good deal for the UK”.

A Department of International Trade source said: “We have set our sights high, but recognize that we need a deal with the US to achieve that goal, and it is clear that the Biden administration is moving ahead with trade deal negotiations with other countries does not give priority.

“We stand ready to move talks forward when the US is, and in the meantime we’re working hard to secure trade wins for British firms, like removing barriers to millions of dollars’ worth of American markets, resolving disputes like to pursue steel and whiskey tariff issues and agreements with individual US states.”

Separately, HM Revenue and Customs data shows that the number of UK companies classified as exporters has fallen from 149,443 in 2020 to 126,812 in 2021.

David Overton runs SplashMaps which creates Fabric maps including OS and Michelin maps which are waterproof.

They sell to consumers, but also to the military.

Mr. Overton said they’ve always sold to other countries – mainly the US, but also Europe.

Their third-largest export destination was Germany, but Mr Overton says changes since Brexit have seen the company now halt all trade with Germany, resulting in a 2-5% drop in sales.

He told the BBC he had noticed that all his exports to Germany were being “bounced back” to the UK.

He realized this was due to an EU directive on plastics and packaging waste, which Germany requires exporters to register through a registry called LUCID.

“We didn’t know there was a registration process,” he said.

“I think what the government could really do is pay for expertise to get those messages out there.”

Exporters fell in all UK countries and regions, but the fall was sharpest in south-east England (23%) and north-west England (15%), with the lowest fall in Northern Ireland (4%). the numbers show.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK remaining in the EU’s single market, which was agreed to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland but has led to controls on some goods moving into Northern Ireland from the UK.

Tina McKenzie of the Federation of Small Businesses said that since the UK-EU trade deal came into effect, businesses are seeing “continued export suppression”.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, Labour’s shadow secretary for international trade, said the data showed a “worrying future trend” and showed that the government had “failed to provide the necessary support to exporters”.

He said Labor would remove trade barriers with the EU but ruled out re-entering the single market or customs union – or returning to free movement.

Instead, the party would seek a veterinary deal to lower barriers to farm exports and “fix” the Northern Ireland Protocol, which has strengthened controls between Britain and Northern Ireland, he told the BBC.

Labor would also seek mutual recognition of professional qualifications to allow more service industries to trade with the EU, seek “equivalent” data protection rules to allow digital services to compete and find “flexible job mobility schemes” for musicians and artists seeking short-term visas for travel to the EU.

On Wednesday, International Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch said the UK “should do better” on trade but was recovering from global factors including Covid and the war in Ukraine.

She told a Commons committee that Britain only left the EU fully in early 2020 and that “the full impact of what we’re going to see after Brexit and all the free trade deals remains to be seen”.

Ms Badenoch’s department said exports had “recovered” from the pandemic and reached £748 billion over the past 12 months, up from £132 billion.